all who survived came back in good health, radiating confidence. Adventure sharpens the natural faculties of mind and body, just as dealing bravely and unflinchingly with stress refines and strengthens the spiritual faculties of the soul.
When you have thoroughly understood, and incorporated into your natural response system, the delicate principle involved in facing all of life's challenges with dignity and faith, you will find yourself using stress as the tool it was intended to be. When you overcome the fear and defensiveness with which you have been reacting to pressure, you, not stress, will have the upper hand, and you will grow stronger and healthier with each encounter, both physically and spiritually.
Human beings must look deeply into the reason for their failure to cope with life's stresses. One of the first steps on the road to recovery might be to become aware of the way we are deliberately exposing ourselves to huge amounts of stress through our own blind ambition. Through ambition, we literally create our own problems. When our self-created troubles bring down on our heads the fruits of our creation, our secret folly becomes manifest and it threatens our ego, our good opinion of ourselves. Now we are stuck with our resentment, ego's automatic reaction to all threats, but resentment will never solve the problem. It can only make it worse.
Resentment, especially the resentment our parents set us up to feel toward them, lies at the root of all our sins. It accounts for our readiness to take offense, the failing response that gives our intimidators the edge and fills them with a sense of power and victory. You soon learn to transfer the resentment you feel toward your parents toward all authority figures, and you can no more win with them than you could with your parents, because they, too, use your resentment to keep you responding in an inferior way and giving up power to them. Many of our elected authorities are really failures who have learned the subtle art of "succeeding" by making others fail. They learn to do unto others what was done to them, and